The Wild Card: Selected Poems, Early and Late [Paperback]

Karl Shapiro (Author), Stanley Kunitz (Editor), David Ignatow (Editor)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0252066898 | ISBN-13: 978-0252066894 | Publication Date: June 1, 1998 | Edition: 1ST

Karl Shapiro, who won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 1945 for his second collection, V-Letter and Other Poems, is an American poetic treasure and an acknowledged master of lyrical poetry whose subjects have ranged from commonplace objects and occurrences to biting political commentary to open celebrations of the contradictions in humanity's moral nature.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Shapiro's influential poems of the 1940s and '50s applied Audenesque techniques and his own metrical facility to then-contemporary, even shocking, subjects: Army life during WWII, when Shapiro served in the Pacific; "Auto Wreck" ("We are deranged, walking among the cops/ Who sweep glass and are large and composed"); a university where "To hurt the Negro and avoid the Jew/ Is the curriculum"; and a soda-fountain "Drug Store" where "the attractive symbols/ Watch over puberty and leer." More than half of this selection draws on those poems, including the Pulitzer-winning V-Letter (1944) and the meditations on American Jewish identity that culminated in Poems of a Jew (1958). The half autobiographical prose-poem series The Bourgeois Poet (1964)?well represented here?gave Shapiro his most individual, most aggressive style, one part Whitman, three parts Philip Roth: "The kitchens of my neighbors are like cars: what gleaming dials, what toothy enamels, engines that click and purr, idling the hours away." Early and late, the poems dwell on social meanings, groups, and types ("The Southerner," "The Conscientious Objector," "The Old Guard") judging and challenging whatever Shapiro views as orthodoxy. The appealingly unceremonious latest poems declare Shapiro's love for his wife, or commemorate poets from Auden to Mozart's librettist Da Ponte. If Shapiro no longer seems as imposing a poetic presence as he once did (though the prefaces help us reimagine his heyday), this selection reminds us that he has for decades thought and felt honestly about poetry, history, society and family, and is a rewarding sampling of the work that thought has produced.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Prolific poets benefit from good selected editions. T. S. Eliot's Choice of Kipling's Verse (1941) revived a metrical master's reputation, and Carl Sandburg is important again because of the Selected Poems (1996) gathered by George and Willene Hendricks. For Shapiro, early star of his World War II generation of U.S. poets, fellow senior bards Stanley Kunitz and the late David Ignatow do the honors, making us see what all the excitement was about and wonder why it abated. Shapiro's early work includes excellent formal lyrics--deadly serious ("Elegy for a Dead Soldier"), scabrously comic ("The Fly"), and in many moods between those extremes--and demonstrates a verbal virtuosity worthy of Auden, Shapiro's acknowledged master. In midcareer Shapiro produced The Bourgeois Poet (1964), a sequence of prose poems, based on his experiences as soldier, New Yorker, Jew, academic, and in other roles, that contradict prose poetry's reputation for vagueness and boredom. His subsequent poems are in meter and rhyme, free verse (his sense of verbal rhythm makes his lines swing, anyway), and prose. They are always about something, always lucid, and the ones in this selection are always memorable. Welcome back to the limelight, Mr. Shapiro! Ray Olson --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 191 pages
• Publisher: University of Illinois Press; 1ST edition (June 1, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0252066898
• ISBN-13: 978-0252066894
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,349,477 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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